The Stylish, Empty Realism of Michael Mann

A still from Michael Mann’s “Heat.” BAM is currently running a retrospective of Mann’s films.

Photograph from Warner Brothers.

The new year is being rung in at BAM Cinématek, which has been dormant since December, with a retrospective of Michael Mann’s films, beginning today. If I were the potentate of programming, I wouldn’t have made this series a priority, and certainly not a leading event. I don’t consider Mann to be one of the leading filmmakers of the time, but his work is nonetheless exemplary; it’s of great historical significance to the cinematic history that’s unfolding now, in real time.

Mann’s reputation is inflated because his virtues—of hard substance and individual style within the framework of studio production and traditional genres—are themselves the reincarnation of cinematic myths, of the illusion that the old-school virtues of studio filmmaking are being perpetuated and, for that matter, that they’re virtues and are worth perpetuating.

I didn’t know, before writing this piece, that Mann got his start in television. Maybe I read about his early career decades ago, and maybe the fact was buried beneath memory. It’s a fact that unfortunately seems all too convenient to fish out now, but his films seem made to complement and nourish the current vogue for serial television. Mann seems to be less his films’ director and (for the most part) screenwriter than their showrunner. Above all, he coördinates the various parts of his story with a juggler’s aplomb, maintaining an exquisitely calibrated balance of dramatic elements to heighten suspense with a musician’s sense of timing. The rhythms of his image-making, the substance of the script, the pacing of editing and performances all seem subordinated to the over-all balance, synthesis, and resolution of the elements of the story.

Does that sound like a bad thing? His storytelling is sculpted, and the shape of the narrative—with image, performance, text, editing, light, and music tailored to fit its sharp contours—provides a weighty, seemingly palpable and three-dimensional experience that surpasses the impact and import of any single image. Mann’s movies are distinguished from less sophisticated and more conventional modes of realism by the feeling that they’re not like filmed screenplays but like filmed blueprints, filmed armatures. But Mann believes deeply in the reality of his subjects and characters nonetheless, and he allows no breaks, no faults, no fractures, no excesses, no loose ends, no figures or turns to stand out from the precisely calibrated design.

Mann is still very much of a stylist, but that’s a value-neutral term. He gives style a bad name—his style is something that he applies to the material, a series of façades that conform to the underlying structure while merely adorning it. His style isn’t substance but a decoration of substance; its essence is in tropes, not in compositions. His films are filled with glowing screens-within-screens, strong lights pointing into the lens, headlights that send horizontal streaks of light to the edges of the frame, looming auras in the background—ornamental figures that don’t define, transcend, or analyze the action, and don’t embody a worldview beyond that of the script, but only bejazzle his somberly grandiose manner.

Mann does convey a worldview in his scripts—a hard-bitten ethos of deep plotting in solitude, of chess-like strategizing in monastic, self-sacrificing isolation. But he’s not interested in showing solitudes themselves, in depicting subjectivity; he displays the results of thought in action. His films culminate in grand action sequences that are neither models of analytical coherence nor of impressionistic abstractions but that get the job done with an overstoked excitement, a pathetic fallacy of cinematic violence that correlates rapid-fire action (action that often involves the literal rapid firing of guns) with abrupt camera moves, hand-held camera work, and quick cutting from one image to the next. Mann doesn’t see what he films, he shows it, conjuring the illusion of reality, of pseudo-documentary, without actually revealing much about place.

It’s understandable that “Thief” may have seemed like a promising début in 1981; it would have seemed like a promising début in 1971, 1961, or 1951. Its main virtue is a strong infusion of bracingly practical, hard-nosed details of the criminal life, based on a novel by Frank Hohimer, the pen name of John Seybold, who told the stories of his own criminal activities (and whom Mann hired as a consultant).

Mann came onto the scene, with “Thief,” at a time when many of the icons of the nineteen-seventies were flaming out after hubristic feats, and others were being overshadowed by a new generation of kiddie-pop filmmakers led by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Mann strode in as a new man—as a man’s man whose tough and earnest underworldliness and rueful sense of the price of commitment must have seemed, to some viewers and critics, bracingly mature yet with a flair suggesting a gravely stoic elegance, a directorial manner that matches that of his heroes. He has been a throwback with a liberal streak—a non-reactionary old-school director whose characters display hard responses to hard circumstances that themselves suggest a world of cruel indifference and reparable woes.

Mann has been constructing, in the course of decades, a vision of serious men, a model of seriousness itself, which is why “Ali” is a unique achievement. “Ali” has the unsurpassable merit of its main character, Muhammad Ali, who is both one of the most serious people in the world and one of the funniest. He is also a true artist of his sport, an athlete whose sense of style within the ring is one of the iconic creations of the age. But so, of course, is Ali’s public persona outside the ring, with its gloriously outrageous histrionics. Within that real-life performance art, though, is a sharp and fierce political temperament, the force of ideas, and Mann emphasizes the bedrock of Ali’s ideas, and tailors Will Smith’s fierce performance to fit it closely.

“Heat” offers a few breathtaking twists, which arise from a quasi-documentary attention to the masterminding of a criminal scheme, and some remarkable reversals resulting from double and triple crosses. The film has the sense of a manifesto, of a throwdown declaration that it will be a masterwork or nothing. It’s neither. It’s Mann’s masterwork in the classic sense of the term—a proof of his mastery, which is prodigious. Mann has a classical respect for craft and technique that’s reflected in his protagonists’ own virtues (including those who practice their craft toward non-virtuous goals). That may also be why Mann doesn’t display any of the practiced craftsman’s self-deprecating humor. The classical Hollywood director who is the most sternly dedicated to the honor of method and to the cult of a job well done, Howard Hawks, is also one of the greatest comedy directors, and even his fiercest and grimmest accounts of life on the line are also laced with a jaunty lightness and seemingly incongruous antics.

Mann builds his films upon myths that he doesn’t dare to reveal as such; his sense of reality overrides his films’ unconsidered dependence upon long-familiar and long-revised cinematic codes and tropes. “The Last of the Mohicans” could have been a movie of the nineteen-fifties, and it plays like a genre rehash of the sort that the Coen brothers could have approached with relish while revealing the assumptions within the conventions. The scene of prisoners in striped suits at the beginning of “Public Enemies” is just this side of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” But Mann, who is less a creator of images than of stories, seems not to see his own movies, and so risks making his films self-parodies in advance.